Bel Ria Read online

  How long had this gone on? Minutes, hours, days or years? He only knew that throughout the summer-laden wind blew steadily, even as it did today, filling him with a strange exhilaration and dreadful sorrow so that he had both laughed and cried: and then had come the fear that he could not get his breath, that the ground was falling away below him — somebody’s arms had held and carried him, then the vapors of Friar’s Balsam steadily steaming from a kettle somewhere drifted over all memory, the ground falling away as it was now . . . the deck below was sinking, sinking . . .

  He jerked fully awake; there was a sound of boots on the companionway at the far end of the flat. He opened the drawer and swept everything into it, and even as he did so there was a second when the world seemed to stop and there was nothing but utter still clarity, and it was as though he suddenly knew something that he had known all his life but had never wanted to know, and had resisted; in this inexorable moment he had accepted it and was resigned, knowing that there was no escape from the knowledge, and never had been.

  He was sitting, tidy and composed, his jacket back on, Ria at his feet, immersed in his book, when Lessing pulled back the curtain.

  Lessing was well over six feet, with enormous hands and feet, his young fresh face dominated by a pair of the most startlingly direct and guileless blue eyes. He was a most likable youngster, so solid and dependable yet unassuming that he was already marked out for further promotion. He stood now in the entrance, seeming to fill the sick bay, and suddenly looked very awkward and unsure of himself. He was going ashore on the next liberty boat, he said; there wouldn’t be anything doing in the town, but he thought he’d walk over the hills and maybe have a swim — would MacLean like to go too?

  Still shocked and spent within, MacLean’s defenses were momentarily down; he had rejected all overtures of friendship so consistently that his solitariness was now an accepted fact and no one ever sought him out for company. He seldom went ashore, only for dockyard stores, and he had never once taken Ria. He smiled, his rare transforming smile, and said that there was nothing he would rather do more — not for the swim for he had never learned to swim, but he loved to walk, and it was a grand day for the walking; but the doctor was ashore, and he was on duty . . . and he thanked Lessing anyway for thinking of it.

  Lessing seemed overwhelmed by this unusual spate of words. He stood there, awkwardly turning his cap in his hand. “Let me take Ria then,” he said at last. He hesitated as the smile vanished but went on resolutely, “It’ll do him good to have a run — get out of this tin box for a while. Must be worse for a dog being cooped up — not even a blooming tree to think about —”

  He had never once looked at the hand, but MacLean knew very well what was in his mind. For a moment he almost reverted to his usual image and told Lessing to mind his own business, and then, almost despite himself, he heard his voice saying “Aye, it’s an unnatural life all right. I’d be glad if you’d take him — off with you then —” to Ria who, sensing something different, pleasurable, exciting, bounded after Lessing.

  MacLean looked out of the scuttle at the sunlit hills beyond the little port. He had relatives here. He had only to go ashore and telephone. His father, or his eldest brother, would take Ria for him, and in time dispatch him farther north and back to Sinclair. It would be as simple as that. He could still go . . .

  He picked up his cap and called after Lessing: “Hold on a minute —”

  The boy’s head reappeared around the curtain, and as MacLean opened his mouth to speak Ria’s face followed, his head cocked to one side inquiringly.

  “I thought —” began MacLean, then, suddenly decisive, he went on: “that this would help —” and he made a quick sketch on a notepad. “You’ll get out of the town quickly that way, then on up a sheep track until you come to a lochan —”

  He watched the liberty boat speed off to the shore, then returned to his place in the sun, at peace with the world despite his throbbing hand.

  Ria came back, his coat warm and fragrant still with the green growing bounty of earth that had been his for three ecstatic hours, his eyes clear and shining, his whole bearing jaunty and confident — a very different dog, as the man who greeted him could not fail to observe. Nor could the dog have failed to sense the difference in the reception from the man.

  The Ark left Oban next morning, steaming down the Firth of Lorne, and when she entered the open Atlantic to turn south, MacLean came up on deck to see the last of the islands of his homeland waters and looked north. On the horizon, off the long black mass of Mull, he could just make out the lonely dot that was the holy island of Iona. He watched until it disappeared at last, and with its going some of the lightness of heart that his Margaret had brought returned to him, as though her laughter came echoing down the years. Unconsciously he smiled.

  Beside him, as though bidden, Ria rose with extended forepaws in the action he had learned brought attention to himself, but which, almost as if aware of the inevitable condemnation it would receive, he had never attempted with MacLean.

  He had judged his moment precisely. He looked up, his eyes round and merry, and for once MacLean looked directly down at him.

  He suddenly knew that she of all people would have been the one for this dog that stood beside him now, that from her extravagance of love and gaiety she would have encouraged and abetted all antic nonsense and found a counterpart in lightheartedness. She had always wanted a dog, but she had understood and given way to him. It had been his one denial to her.

  “Behave yourself —” he said now with automatic severity, but the smile still lingered. Ria got down at once, but he wagged his tail with unabashed enthusiasm and continued to look as though he were laughing with open mouth and lolling tongue.

  They turned and made their way along the deck to the stern. Ria scampering ahead unchecked. Barkis saw them from the bridge, hurled himself down, and joined them. He threw himself at Ria in his customary onslaught of pleased greeting, but Ria sidestepped him neatly at the last moment and he drew up all standing, looking very puzzled. He launched himself again, and again; he whirled suddenly one way and then the other, but always, like a toreador playing a bull, Ria evaded him in the nick of time. It built up into an exuberant game: weight and speedy cunning versus equal cunning but lightweight nimbleness.

  MacLean watched, so absorbed by Ria’s tactics that he was unaware of the Captain’s approach until Ria fractionally misjudged his timing and nearly overbalanced to a side eddy variation of the latest whirlwind Barkis approach. “Barkis’s round, I think,” said a complacent voice behind him. But even as the Captain spoke, Ria recovered his balance, managing an amazing pirouette of an about-turn as he did so, then turned and chased Barkis, who fled in mock terror before him.

  “Sir!” acknowledged MacLean, straightening respectfully, but his voice was equally complacent.

  Thereafter, this game was played whenever conditions of calm or inactivity allowed, with endless variations and an apparent rule between the contestants that neither should ever win. Not only did it give the dogs the exercise they so badly needed, but it was a spectator sport that fascinated Hyacinthe. She would appear like magic on some vantage point above, her green eyes huge and intense, her head following the play like an umpire at Wimbledon. Having been caught up herself once by mistake in the game, she saw to it that such hideous indignity could never happen again and always chose her perch well out of dog reach.

  Occasionally nowadays, bored with Louis’s persistence, she had taken to seeking out Ria for diversion. Hyacinthe’s favorite pastime was staring: as close as possible, she would fix her unwinking green orbs on her subject and stare and stare. No one could outstare her, and when at last the opposing eyes blinked, she would stretch and purr and wind herself around her victim in triumphant pleasure.

  But in Ria, who could spend hours gazing into some limitless space, she met her unswerving match. She would approach with measured tread as he lay with his head on his paws, settle herself comf
ortably with her front paws tucked in towards one another under her chest, then snap her eyes wide open at almost nose-to-nose range on Ria’s. “Like a myopic tea cozy,” as the doctor said one day, sketching the contestants. He added a pair of glasses above Hyacinthe’s whiskers, her head sticking out of a furry cozy in place of a teapot spout, and curved her luxurious ringed tail into the shape of a handle. Finally Ria was caricatured before her into nothing but a pair of huge eyes surmounted by ears, one up and one down.

  “What will you do with him eventually?” he asked idly, adding another whisker to Hyacinthe.

  “Return him to the man who brought him aboard, sir,” said MacLean. “Fortunately I was able to find his name and unit from the records.”

  “Most fortunate indeed,” agreed the doctor blandly. He looked up. “It won’t be easy, will it — I mean to part with him after all these months?”

  There was a long pause. “Aye,” said MacLean at last.

  “What do you mean ‘aye’?”

  There was an even longer pause. “I mean ‘no,”’ said MacLean. “No, sir, it will not be easy now.” The admission was forced out of him; out at last, laid starkly bare before his own mind.

  “ ‘Brothers and Sisters, I bid you beware/Of giving your heart to a dog to tear,’ ” said the doctor lightly, looking up in mischievous expectation of the customary acid reaction to such sentiment. “Kipling — The ‘Power of the Dog,’ ” he emphasized.

  But for once he was disappointed: MacLean merely looked thoughtful as he rubbed the already gleaming top of the sterilizer. “Indeed, sir,” he said, politely.

  He found the card on Christmas day, a freezing joyless day in mid-Atlantic, with Tertian plunging and rearing in mountainous seas that crashed over her decks and cascaded down every inch so that there was no dry place on board, and Christmas cheer perforce was corned beef and hardtack, for the galley fires had been extinguished.

  To S.B.A. MacLean —

  LATITUDE ? Wind NNE — Force 10 gale

  LONGITUDE ?

  MERRY, MERRY CHRISTMAS AT SEA 1940

  was scrawled unevenly underneath in an obviously Force 10 hand.

  He put the card away where other men kept photographs of families and sweethearts, in his paybook. After much thought and doubt as to whether he had lost his senses with such foolishness, he folded and packaged his latest pair of socks. The English were great on Christmas, he excused himself, as he left the package on the desk and went off to put on all the heavy weather gear he could muster, for it was time to make the routine check of his first aid caches throughout the ship.

  The lifelines on deck had been rigged almost from the time they left port, stout ropes with running handgrips or tails, stretching along the length of the deck. He emerged from the doorway hardly able to stand against the force of the wind, grabbed one of the tails and started off along the pitching treacherous deck. But Ria must have slipped out at his heels, for as he turned his face away from the wind he suddenly saw him, paws resisting uselessly against the icy tilt, sliding towards the rails. At the same moment MacLean was aware of a monstrous wave towering over the port bow towards its climax. Never knowing afterwards how he had done it, he flung himself down, still hanging onto the rope tail, and managed to grab Ria’s collar, his arm feeling as though it would be pulled out of its socket when the monster crashed and the foaming torrents swept along the deck. Somehow he hung on, and somehow he got Ria back inside, and there in his relief he gave way to a very natural human reaction.

  “A’choin an diabhoil!” he roared at the shaken soaking dog, and smacked him resoundingly. And this time Ria acknowledged a rightfulness of punishment, accepting the smack with a suitably contrite rolling of his eyes, and even a placatory attempt with the end of his tail. With his soaked coat revealing every line of his slight frame, he suddenly looked very vulnerable. MacLean was totally won over. “You devil of a dog, you,” he translated, but softly, and he carried Ria down to dry him off as much as possible with an already soaked towel from his dripping locker in a drearily sloshing mess. From the crackling wireless came the strains of “God rest ye merry gentlemen.”

  “Stupid animal followed me out,” he explained to Reid.

  “It’s only a bloody fool of a human who’d go up on deck unless he had to,” said Reid mildly. “Can’t your turret trip wait?”

  “You don’t know what that lot on the guns will get up to,” said MacLean darkly. “Nicking my dressings for nose wipes, pinching my plaster for their corns — it’s every day it’s got to be or there wouldn’t be a thing left.”

  “Set forth, then, good Saint MacLean,” said Reid. “I’ll see that your page doesn’t follow in your footsteps this time.” He bundled up the shivering dog in a jersey and stowed him — for once with no remonstration — in at his back. Usually, Ria curled up there in peaceful contentment, but this time Reid noticed that he remained strangely tense and reluctant to stay, even whining softly; there was no relaxation until MacLean returned.

  But the subtle change in relationship went unnoticed by anyone else, including MacLean himself, for the transition from him imposing his will to Ria anticipating his wishes had evolved so naturally he was unaware of it. They remained to the rest of the ship’s company the same undemonstrative pair together, with Ria being himself the same amusing self-reliant diversion as always. There were few who could resist his unique blend of showmanship and humor, and his remarkable ability for interpreting speech or mustering another trick had gained him a reputation for almost supercanine intelligence.

  He had long drawn a self-imposed line between the upper and lower decks: the lower decks were his territory, the upper deck’s apparently Barkis’s, and should he happen to find himself there — perhaps at the invitation of the doctor — he became very circumspect, never entering a cabin unless he were invited. Sometimes, passing by, his curiosity would get the better of him and he would stick only his head around an open door. As he was always soft-footed as a cat, this sudden appearance of a disembodied head with enormous interested eyes could be quite startling.

  His interests had become legion and had ranged beyond mere seabird-, convoy- or iceberg-watching to the entire ship’s company, for not only was he immensely inquisitive, but he liked to keep an eye on everything aboard. MacLean’s sense of the proprieties would never have recovered had he known the full extent of canine bounds transgressed. A routine that afforded great interest was the Captain’s rounds, when a small unobtrusive shadow would hover at a discreet distance in the wake of the inspecting party — and thereby penetrate normally inaccessible quarters.

  Once a Very August Personage indeed was piped aboard Tertian in port, and later met both Louis and Ria. Louis — dressed to the nines for the occasion in a sailor suit — was unimpressed by the sudden wealth of gold braid, having eyes only as always for the Captain’s golden beard, but Ria’s professional assessment could not be faulted: he sat up and saluted smartly on request and had his head patted by the August hand in reward. MacLean, hearing about this episode later, found it hard to look convincingly disapproving.

  He had not realized how much of his heart had been given to be torn until Tertian returned to Devonport in late February. He was looking forward with unusual pleasure to a forty-eight hour leave, and had made plans to spend it walking on Dartmoor with Ria — the first time they would ever have gone off together. When the mail was distributed that first morning in port there was one letter for him, and the contents came as the most profound and hurtful shock.

  Donald Sinclair was out of hospital and returned to his Highland glen, there to await a final medical board before being discharged from the Army. He would no longer be any good on the hills, he said, but eventually he would be running a farm instead, and now at last he could relieve Ria’s benefactor of his obligation — “. . . so thoughtlessly imposed upon you. Now at last we can give the dog a settled home. Any port that you are in — if you could dispatch him from there to Glasgow, someone will pick h
im up there and bring him on to us. . . .” He enclosed a postal order to cover any expenses involved, the ticket, and the purchase of the obligatory muzzle for “an unaccompanied dog.”

  Suddenly the world seemed very bleak, and MacLean’s pleasure turned to ashes. Even fate seemed to be working against him, for within ten minutes of confiding this news to Reid, arrangements slipped easily and inexorably into place to preclude any valid deferment: Reid had returned from telephoning a sister who lived in Plymouth to say that she was traveling up to Yorkshire in a few days’ time. The same train would go on up to Glasgow.

  “Ria could go ashore with me this afternoon and I’ll leave him with her,” he said hesitantly. “But are you sure you have to do this? After all this time — he’s part of our Ark now . . .”

  “It has to be done,” said MacLean with such a wooden finality in his expression that Reid was silent.

  It all happened so quickly that there was no time to brood, no time for the heaviness of his heart to be communicated, for the morning was fully occupied with routine duties. At noon he changed and went ashore with a brushed, trimmed and bright-eyed Ria who was only innocently excited at the prospect of a walk on dry land.

  Once clear of the dockyard gates, MacLean handed him over, then, feeling like a Judas, told him to go with Reid. “Away you, go for a run —” he said, forcing a reassurance. Ria was very attached to Reid and had often gone ashore with him, but now he must suddenly have sensed something disastrous. As MacLean turned away down the street he whined and struggled to follow, straining at the end of the short lead.

  Reid picked him up to soothe him, but as MacLean turned the corner he heard a sound that he had never heard before — Ria barking, and barking in a high-pitched almost hysterical despair that was to haunt him for days afterwards.

  He shut out the sound in the refuge of the nearest pub, the first of many that saw him that day. He drank himself into a state of solitary savage gloom such as he had not attained for a very long time — and barely made it back on board.